


Life: A Series of Moments

by Ruvarashe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Break Up, M/M, Moving On, Mpreg, Pregnant Draco Malfoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24012067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruvarashe/pseuds/Ruvarashe
Summary: Life is a sum of thousands of moments that, put together, tell our individual stories. Some moment are brief with minimal impact and others have the power to shape every other moment that comes after. This is the story of Draco and Harry's breakup and the moments that come after.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 156
Collections: HD Mpreg 2020





	1. A Moment of Heartache

**Author's Note:**

> Betas: NC and AC

There are 60 seconds in a minute,  
3,600 seconds in an hour,  
86,400 in a day,

We experience the present, moment by moment; and we move through time carrying the sum of all those moments with us, in the story of our lives.There are some moments that feel like a lifetime and then there are fleeting moments. And out of all the dimensions of time, it takes less than a second to create another human. Think about that. One moment to spark a lifetime. 

***

In real life, unlike in the movies, you don’t get a warning before things go bad. No foreboding theme song to let you know that the building’s about to explode. Life happens on its own schedule and when things go awry you just have to deal with those moments as they come. 

“Dammit Potter! Why now?” Draco kept moving through the kitchen with a frantic sort of energy. Rearranging the pots and pans, cutlery, everything, anything to keep his mind off the matter at hand. 

“Can you just stand still for a second so we can talk about this.” 

Draco stopped and finally took a good look at Harry who was sitting at their dining table. Theirs. Their table, in their house which was just another part of their life that didn’t exist anymore. A life three years in the making, gone just like that. As that last thought hit him, Draco finally allowed himself to fully experience the overwhelming grief that had been threatening to take over his mind since Harry started the conversation.

“I think we should break up.”

“You’ve already said that! I want to know why? I don’t just don’t understand. We’re… we’re supposed to meet up with Neville this weekend, to get some ideas for the garden now that spring is here. And Blaise and Pansy are coming over for dinner next week. And we have our weekly pub nights with Ron and Theo and Hermoine and … We have a plan. We have a schedule. We have a life and it works. You can’t just come down for breakfast and break up wit-”

“See! That’s the problem.” Harry seemed entirely too calm for this. “We’re too young.”

“Too young for a garden?” Draco wasn’t being deliberately obtuse. He just felt like he’d been bamboozled. 

“Yes! Too young to be settling into this pattern. Don’t you ever wonder if there’s more to life than this? The war ended and we just settled. It’s all been too easy. When did we stop looking for adventure in life?”

Draco shook his head and continued with his frantic movements in the kitchen. Harry was making it sound like it had been such an easy path to get to where they were. It hadn’t been. At least not for Draco. It still wasn’t. There wasn’t a day that he spent out in public where someone didn’t look at him with suspicion on their face. Or hesitate before serving him at a store. Or unconsciously put themselves between him and any children when walking down the street. The overt hexes and curses may have stopped but Draco was still dealing with the impact of having been on the wrong side of the war. 

Draco looked down at the dark mark that had faded to a pale grey on his slender wrist. “No. It hasn’t been easy.”

“You… you know that’s not what I’m talking about.” Harry’s voice faltered for the first time since he broached the subject. “I just mean. We started dating when we were 18. Neither of us had ever really dated before then. We never really got to experience the normal things that kids our age should have because of the war. I want more than thi-” Harry stopped, trying to find a way to phrase it without discounting what they had. “I love you but I want to be selfish for the first time in my life. I have too many regrets. I just want to live a little. We’re too young to be living like we’re middle aged with this set routine to our lives. Is it so bad for us to try out living apart? To experience what it's like to date someone you didn’t go to school with? To do things that aren’t expected of us? I need this.” 

At this point Draco had moved all of the dishes in the kitchen into the sink and was aggressively scrubbing at them one at a time. Trying to wash off some invisible stain on the clean crockery. It took a while before he trusted his voice enough to respond.

“Ok. Let’s break up then.” 

And with that. They ended their old life together. In a surprisingly short, inexplicably calm conversation.


	2. New Beginnings

It takes 22 days from conception for a fetus’s heart to start beating  
At around 84 days they start moving  
At 126 days they can hear you when you talk to them 

In all of magical history, there were only 28 recorded cases of a wizard getting pregnant without the use of potions. That’s 28 cases, in 10,000 years in a population that averages 1,400,000. That means as a wizard, you have a 1 in a billion chance of falling pregnant unaided. And yet, here we are.  
***  
Harry felt bad for asking for the breakup. That meant that Draco got to keep the apartment. For Draco that didn’t feel like a win. If anything, it made it feel like time had stood still and he was just waiting for Harry to get back from a long trip.

He thought it was too early to start dating. Pansy did not. It took a month after the break-up before she was trying to set him up with any and all eligible young wizards between the ages of 21 and 31. At first he resisted. It was too soon. But fighting with Pansy was more trouble than it was worth and so they came to a compromise. She got three chances to set him up and if it didn’t work out with any of them he got a break. 

The first one was a total bust. A snobby young pureblood who seemed to think Draco was some simpering ditzy debutante who was just looking for the groom to her blushing bride. An easy one to dismiss. 

The second bachelor was much harder to reject off the bat. He was funny. Very different from Harry. To start with, there was no history between them. Phillip had grown up in America and had only moved to London in the last year. His life was very firmly ensconced in the muggle world. Both his parents were muggles and his great -grandfather had started a very successful shipping business over 70 years ago. Despite finding out that he was a wizard at 11 and going to wizarding school till he was 17, Phillip had also kept up with his muggle education and had gone to university before joining the family business. In contrast, Harry had scorned the muggle world after the war. He didn’t do it in public, lest it encourage some of the anti-muggle sentiment that still permeated parts of the wizarding world, but he did make a real effort to stay out of it. Phillip was easy, and witty, and dependable. Unlike both Draco and Harry, he didn’t have demons that were constantly chasing him. He had lived a fairly easy and happy life straddling both the muggle and wizarding worlds. 

After that first date, Draco had told Phillip that he wasn’t ready to date and Phillip had understood. Being new to the area he didn't really know anyone so they promised to keep in touch. And they did. Despite having led vastly different lives they did find some interesting points of commonality. Both came from families that had an overinflated sense of self importance that manifested itself in pressure for the heir to succeed in life, increase the family fortune and create another heir to repeat this process. The fact that one family was muggle and the other was a member of the sacred 28 didn’t change the way Draco and Phillip really related to each other’s experiences. It helped that at 30, Philip was a fair bit older than Draco. He had experienced life and had a sort of strength and decisiveness to him that made Draco feel confident enough in their relationship to start opening himself up.

Several non-dates later. Draco was seriously reconsidering the whole not-dating thing. After all, Harry was certainly dating his way through town if the prophet was to be believed. A month after they first met, Phillip and Draco shared their first kiss. 

***  
It started with subtle symptoms, a headache that came and went several times over the course of a couple of weeks. Then some nausea that usually resolved itself when Draco took the time to eat. He figured it was just stress. The physical manifestation of his life falling apart around him a couple of months ago. Each of his friends had taken to inviting him out to eat at least once a week since the breakup, one after the other on a set schedule. Even Ron and Hermoine took a shift, making sure he still came out to pub nights even if Harry was very noticeably missing. Between them and Phillip it felt like he was rebuilding a new normal for himself.

It took two and a half months from when Harry had left before he finally found out. He was at lunch with Neville who’d asked him out to enquire about a potion that could revive dead plants. It was all theoretical of course. Just as there were no potions that could revive a dead person. Plants like people had a life essence that couldn’t be brought back once they’d crossed the threshold and moved beyond the veil of death. It was still interesting to debate the components of this theoretical potion with Neville whose brain seemed to sharpen into a precise weapon when you got him talking about herbology. 

They were sitting in a small neighborhood cafe waiting for their sandwiches and debating about whether boomslang skin could be used in this potion without the addition of any alkaline solutions to stabilize it. Draco had just stood to go to the bathroom, continuing his point as he folded his napkin up and placed it on the table.

“You can’t solve it with lemongrass. Yes it would lower the acidity but it would render the minotaur horns basically inert, and you need those to -” 

He had just taken a step from his chair when the dizzy spell hit him. The next thing he knew Neville was gathering him from the floor and apparating them both to St. Mungos. 

“You seem to be about five months along.” 

The doctor was nothing if not blunt. Apparently the basic diagnostic test that they run on you the second you step in one of the St. Mungos’ private exam rooms includes a pregnancy test. Neville had left at this point. Draco had assured him that he was ok and would be able to see the doctor on his own. It took Draco a few moments to absorb the diagnosis. As soon as it had hit him that he was really carrying a baby, his first question had been when. 

Five months. 

After that things moved pretty quickly. The doctor left and was soon replaced by an obstetrician. With a natural wizard pregnancy, as rare as they were, the baby tended to be underweight. Luckily, with the potions that were now available to help wizards get pregnant, there were also potions to support them in maintaining a healthy uterus and placenta. Even wizards who had fallen pregnant without the aid of these potions could take them to help the fetus grow. That was part of the reason why Draco wasn’t even showing yet. 

After he left the doctors office he stopped by an apothecary to pick up his prenatal potions and headed home to think through how he was going to tell Harry about this. At the end it was as easy as sending a letter. As soon as the owl flew out to head to Harry’s, Draco warded the apartment and went to sleep. He wanted Harry to know but that didn’t mean he was ready to deal with the conversation that would have to come after. He didn’t even give himself a chance to think about the other conversations he would have to have with everyone else.


	3. Ever After

There are some things that are extremely difficult to quantify. Things like the value of a second chance at love. The weight of that feeling you get in your chest when someone you care about is hurt. The gravitational forces that bind a family together. 

***

That first conversation about the baby ended up being much easier than he expected. Harry had taken it very calmly. Like he was resigned to them getting back together to raise this child. It was nice that Harry was ready to step into the role of a family because Draco certainly wasn’t. Did he still love Harry? Yes. Had he forgiven him for destroying their life together? No. Had he started moving on? Yes. Even though Phillip and him had only really been dating for six weeks. He was more curious about what type of life they could build together than he was about the life he had had with Harry. 

Phillip and him had talked about the baby. That was when Philip had revealed that he was sterile - polo accident when he was a child. He’d never thought he’d have children. While he didn’t love the idea of Harry becoming a permanent part of Draco’s life, he was ready to help raise this child who at this point was a fetus of only 28 weeks old. Needless to say Harry and Phillip got on like oil and water. But they made it work. Harry wanted to go to all the birthing classes, to take part in all of the doctors appointments and be a part of the conversations around a birth plan, and what would come after. And he got to do all of that. Phillip got the times in between. He got to give Draco the backrubs when his back started aching. He dealt with the midnight cravings when he stayed the night and was the resident handyman as Draco started putting a nursery together. They made it work.

***  
Scorpius James Potter Malfoy was born three weeks early. Harry almost didn’t make it to the hospital in time. After it was all over, the doctor placed Scorp on Draco’s chest and Harry sat next to the bed staring in Draco’s eyes as they took in the fact they now had a child together. Time seemed to stand still for a moment.  
*

Phillip was waiting in the hospital lobby for his chance to meet the child that would hopefully become a key part of his family. In his pocket he had a box with a ring that he had bought three months ago, the night after Draco had told him he was pregnant. Was it early? Yes, most people would say so. But when you knew you knew. Phillip had known from the first moment that he spoke to Draco that he was it for him. He was in love with him and already loved Scorp, even before he got to meet him. What was time when you had found your family?  
*

Draco looked away first, holding the baby closer to his nose and taking in the new baby smell. Harry watched them both and for a second he regretted that moment many months ago when he had broken it off. Part of him grieved for the family that could have been. Another part of him knew that he had done what he needed to do at that time. If he could have looked into Draco’s mind he would have known that he agreed. That while they had loved each other; while they would always love each other in their own way, they had needed time apart. Time to live outside of the shadow of the kids that they used to be. 

They both heard the door open and looked up to see Phillip walking into the delivery room with a bouquet of paperwhite narcissus and lilies to symbolize the family that Scorp was never going to get to know. As sad as that thought was, between Draco, Harry and Phillip, Scorp would never want for anything in this life. 

What none of them knew at that moment in time was that this was not the end of Draco and Harry’s story. Happily ever after is a moment - sometimes brief and sometimes long lasting. The end of one moment is the beginning of the next. But that’s a story for another day...

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Official Sound Track: Marianas Trench, Ever After (the song not the album)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please show the author your appreciation in a comment and by leaving kudos below. ♥
> 
> This story is part of the on-going and anonymous H/D Mpreg fest. The author will be revealed June 21st.


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